MINERVA

NADIA DE VRIES

'These poems personify illness, and particularly mental illness, as a feminine creature that plays, speaks, eats, and sings. In homage to the painting of Truth that might act as an epigraph, the poems explore the literal embodiment of female madness, or hysteria. If Hysteria were a woman, what would she eat? How would she spend her weekends?

Using characteristics of the "mad girl" archetype (Ophelia, Bertha Mason), these four poems attempt to simultaneously celebrate and dismantle the cultural stereotypes about female illness, mood swings and chronic pain.'

MINERVA / Series IV : Figurations

HELEN CHARMAN

'I’m interested in erotic dreams, particularly their interaction with celebrity culture: that uncanny feeling upon waking that you’ve internalised a fantasy of intimacy with someone you do not actually know. I’m interested, too, in the way the unsettling power dynamics inherent in heterosexual desire reveal themselves in the figures that appear in my subconscious. Annie Clark—perhaps obviously—sits apart from the other three figures in the series. The fantasy there is a more lucid one: a desire for an engagement with a female sexuality that is powerful, clever, funny, and moving. Clark, as her alter-ego St. Vincent, doesn't deny the existence of vulnerability, but presents and interrogates it on her own terms. To me, she represents a way to escape objectification without eschewing my own desire; something the other three poems struggle to find.'

MINERVA / Series IV : Figurations

REBECCA TAMÁS

'These spell-poems come out of a longer series on witchcraft/ the occult/ the mystic and the connection these things might have to feminism and the challenging of gender rigidity. When my poems became spells I felt much more free to maul and attack language, to make it speak differently. Lilith eats boys for breakfast, reality starts getting weird and fun, hidden magic starts creeping out of the vocabulary.

Spells can allow you to connect to a bizarre but fertile history of powerful, tangible utterance- poems that might actually hop off the page and hurt you, or help you.'

AK BLAKEMORE

'These poems were written at different times and with different intents, so I decided to run with the conceit that all are collage poems composed using the love-letters of prisoners on death row.

They are not - but a uniting thread is, I suppose, my interest in the aesthetics of horror, which tends to play on the disgust invoked by the other, whether corpse, murderer, or something less banal. In the same way the creaking Victorian haunted houses of Henry James or Charles Dickens are parsed by people with more time than me as metaphors for the convoluted 19th-century psyche, it seems to me that the tropes of contemporary horror film are an interesting way into modern concerns of isolation/ integration, bodily autonomy/ differentiation. These poems are explorations of that, in their different ways.'

DECLAN RYAN

'I've always been a boxing fan but a couple of years back I found myself quite taken with the language used by fighters in interviews, a certain flatness and matter-of-factness in their tone, often coupled with wildly self-aggrandising claims. I was also struck by the parallels between their biographies. So often great fighters started off being spoken of as godlike, their airs of invincibility near-mythical, but almost always they were eventually bested, often brutally. I was interested in the comebacks and resurrection stories, as well as in the ones who lost it once, and forever, and in the wider idea of their having winnowed themselves to the last inch, having reached their limit, and in what happened when that wasn't enough.'

MARK WALDRON

'Many years ago I was attending a weekly poetry workshop when a young German poet who spoke barely a word of English joined the group. At first his poems (he wrote in English) were gibberish, but after a few months had passed, and his English had gradually improved, the poems entered a period in which they began to almost make sense. They teetered tantalisingly, sometimes delightfully, on the edge of meaning for a period of perhaps a few weeks before his English improved further and they entered a third phase in which they began to lose their strange elusive quality. I’m hoping my bad French poems might, to a French ear at least, hover somewhere close to meaning in some unintended but interesting way, but, of course, I’ve no way of telling if that’s the case.'

ALEX MACDONALD

MINERVA / Series II:Architecture curates poetry PDFs that have a perceived affinity with architectonics.

Alex, on cats;

'These poems are made from the translated captions of Instagram profiles of cats, mainly from the original Japanese and Korean. Both these countries have problems with stray cats - either they're seen as a novelty or they are met with an unfortunate end. These Instagram cats (often of a pedigree) are beyond this - they are not pictured outside the modern tidy flats where they live, where they have furniture designed for them and are cared for; they are incredibly fortunate and their owners make a virtue of their lifestyle.'

ANGUS SINCLAIR

MINERVA / Series II:Architecture curates poetry PDFs that have a perceived affinity with architectonics.

Angus, on secretion;

'After the show, Butter Bebop (Transatlantic Creme Dreams) at Alison Jacques Gallery in London finished, and which I was able to visit only once, I felt a real sense of exclusion knowing I no longer had permission to be with those paintings. Secretion is the separation of one fluid from another and also a sense of conversion. I am in the launderette reading the word secreted over and over again. Tumbling around with its weepy associations is also the past participle of secret. Whatever exchange may have happened as I stood half-cut as I am now, delighted with those beaming works, finding rhythms which felt familiar, a formedness which (I flatter myself) I see in some of my better poems - whatever it was had begun to trickle in or out; the show is over, the paintings are secreted away and I have barely begun to understand anything.'

HILARY S. JACQMIN

MINERVA / Series II:Architecture curates poetry PDFs that have a perceived affinity with architectonics.

Hilary, on houses & gardens;

'I have been drawn to the topic of country houses and gardens for a long time, initially because of their visual splendour. Growing up, I made frequent visits to Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, Ohio, a Tudor Revival mansion built between 1912 and 1915 for the founder of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. I loved Stan Hywet’s ornate architecture and landscaped grounds, which include a walled English garden complete with reflecting pool. The life of the estate seemed present, distilled somehow into the rust-stippled screen door at the back of the Great Hall or the rustling birch tree allée. Still, I would imagine how magnificent the house must have been when it was full of people.

As an undergraduate English major at Wesleyan University, inspired by classes on Gothic and Victorian literature, I became fascinated by garden history and the complex way that houses and gardens have been used as sites of meaning and control. As an MA student in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA student in poetry at the University of Florida, I wrote numerous poems, many of them set in England, about houses and gardens. These poems were based on extensive research, some of which I conducted on-site. I found that visits to historic houses and gardens invariably inspired me to write when I had exhausted other subjects.

I hope that these four pieces succeed as poems of both critique and longing.'

TOBY MARTINEZ DE LAS RIVAS

MINERVA / Series I:Materials curates poetry PDFs that use a specific thread of 'material' running throughout 4 poems in some way.

Toby, [why] crucifixions:

Although we think of history as moving, as continuing, and as ourselves as bound up in its flow, it is my view that history has already ended; or, rather, that history’s telos has been reached, and that what remains is an endless recapitulation, an after-echo of that moment of attainment, rather like the ripples in a lake moving outward from the point at which a stone hits the water – I refer to the crucifixion, and believe it to be the defining image of Man, which no other image can supercede, though our species thrives and spreads to every corner of the universe. Whatever we may hope, what we finally know is that each of us must come to terms with and fulfill the image of a man or woman hanging in agony, abandoned and alone.

Whether we can grasp the consolation that is offered as part of this dynamic of suffering and loss is a personal and private matter for each of us, but prior to that, and upon which that consolation and hope is contingent, there rises the image of the cross, the fundamental and perfect precept and representation of existence – imprinted in the smallest micro-organism, and looming between the very poles of the physical universe, from the beginning to the end.

FRANCINE ELENA

MINERVA / Series I:Materials curates poetry PDFs that use a specific thread of 'material' running throughout 4 poems in some way.

Francine, [why] on Ovid's Metamorphoses:

'Before I began these poems I translated the Latin text, so the materials I used were quite physical, in the sense that I was sitting down with Loeb books and pencils and dictionaries. I tried to find a way to recast stories that I particularly liked, retaining the plot outlines and characterisation. It became quite addictive.

I often avoid direct personal experience in my poems and look for other sources to draw on. The stories here do mean something to me, though. Persephone was one of my favourite fairy tales as a child and I used to listen to Ted Hughes read Tales from Ovid on cassette tape. After a number of years translating Classical poetry, many of the myths have worked their way quite deeply into my imagination.'

MARTHA SPRACKLAND

MINERVA / Series I:Materials curates poetry PDFs that use a specific thread of 'material' running throughout 4 poems in some way.

Martha, [why] On Sharks:

'The mako shark is sort of my familiar, I suppose. In a more general way I'm fascinated by sharks – I love their shape and their movement, their dark, strange environments, the near-absolute unknowability of their lives; but there's one particular shark who follows me around. Its presence is ambivalent – the shark is sometimes a stand-in for my anxiety, compulsions and intrusive thoughts (I can't explain why). I imagine it at my shoulder, slowly turning the air as it swims with me everywhere I go, simultaneously reassuring and ominous, comforting and yet psychically dangerous, deeply symbolic to the point of mythology. It's a great word, as well, isn't it, shark – a sort of cutting-blade the shape of its own fin.'